Long-distance with your adviser

I knew when I moved across the Atlantic Ocean that some adjustments would have to be made. I would need to adjust to a new language, to new foods, to new lay-outs of stores, to new working hours, to new customs. However, nobody warned me about the difficulties of having my adviser four thousand miles and six time-zones away.

I like working with my adviser. He has always been willing to answer my clueless questions, give me advice on the best way to get involved in things, and made sure he checked up on my progress regularly. When my office was down the hall from his, I would weekly receive either an unexpected visit or an email requesting that we have a talk. Actually, it is kind of refreshing to not have to worry about him suddenly commenting on something in my ear when I didn't realize he was behind me or getting an email saying that he wants me to come by his office as he wants to have a talk with me. I guess he has never figured out how ominous that sounds.

While here, I don't have to worry about these things. Also, since it's summer, my number of institute meetings has been cut back, so I don't have to make as many presentations to the professors from my university.



Recently, however, I have had this distinct impression that my adviser doesn't find this turn of events as comforting as I do. Without being able to chat with me during a weekly meeting or watch me wander past his office, he needs new indicators of what I'm doing. Most of that comes through email discussions and presentations to CERN groups and other high-profile stuff. But graduate students are supposed to be up to their ears in service work and taking shifts and learning how computing at CERN works, and none of those activities make it into big presentations or email discussions. I can legitimately be working like crazy and have no finished product to reassure my adviser I have not been sleeping my days away.

In fact, that happened a couple weeks ago. I spent all of a Friday and most of the weekend tracking down data samples in particular formats and gathering them up for use by my entire group; this is the kind of grunt work those of us here have to do and it's what my post-doc asked me to do. Come Monday, my adviser sent an email commenting to the post-doc I work with, myself, and another student of his that our minimal involvement in a certain email discussion wasn't good, implying not good enough.

I let my post-doc deal with that one.

I'm not sure what is the best way to deal with this. For now, I keep a set of slides detailing my current analysis project posted online at a sharepoint for my group, and email my adviser when I update them (and make sure I thoroughly answer any questions of his, even if they mean he just didn't read the slides closely enough). That doesn't let him know when I am on shift or busy with service work studies or dataset production, but it's a start.